Process-Based Software Project Management

Not connecting software project management to actual, real-world development processes can lead to cost overruns, bad tasking decisions, and unrealistic schedules that can hinder any software project. This volume describes clearly and simply how to make the project management-process management connection to control software engineering tasking, quality, metrics, and repeatability. Detailing intelligent planning and tracking activities, it demonstrates how to use a process framework that has huge positive impact on performing software project management. This book also deals with intelligent planning to manage changing customer requirements related to rework scheduling and costs.

The author's more than twenty years of experience as a contractor for commercial and Department of Defense (DOD) software engineering projects is demonstrated by numerous stories of how many institutions go about the SPM process in an inefficient or disorganized manner. He provides a framework that begins at the project proposal stage and guides the reader from generalized definitions of the SPM environment and key role players to specific implementation at an institutional level of each connected part of his SPM approach.

The author encourages readers to take the guesswork out of the SPM process and follow a model that systematically breaks up a large project into small, interconnected tasks. The author suggests using Internet-standard HTML forms and hyperlinks to represent the SPM structure of a project.

With top-down design techniques and efficient “connecting the dots,” everyone involved in a project—accountants to developers to metrics gatherers—have a central point of reference to drill down to specific sub-tasks or view the progress of a software project.